


inconceivable

by kindclaws



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Princess Bride Fusion, F/M, Season 3 but fun, Space Opera, there's also memori but i don't wanna fill up the tag with a side relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25372468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: The first touch of his fingers on her wrists makes her whole body shiver. She’s so painfully aware of him being just behind her, of the wonder and the impossibility of his existence here, that she has to remind herself to keep breathing as he slowly picks apart the knots binding her hands together. “If I turn around, will you be gone?” she murmurs. “Is this a bad dream? Will you be dead again when I wake up?”“I’m real,” he says softly, and finally the last knot falls away and her hands are free.It's practically inconceivable.(Chopped 3 presents: The Princess Bride. In space, bitches.)
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 15
Kudos: 117
Collections: Chopped 3.0 Round 2





	inconceivable

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the latest Chopped 100 challenge, meaning it had to include 4 mandatory ingredie- I mean, tropes.   
> \- based on a TV show/movie, but like, sci fi-ified  
> \- a reunion  
> \- a kiss to keep cover/keep a secret (it's not gonna be who you think it is)  
> \- forehead touches 
> 
> This might the campiest thing I've ever written, and it barely holds a candle to the real Princess Bride. Enjoy!

The pneumatic doors hissed open with a creak that no amount of oil ever erased. Slow, measured footsteps approached and stopped just behind Clarke. Over her shoulder, she heard an impatient huff.

“The clinic’s closed.”

She didn’t look up from the tools she was sterilizing, but a smile did tug at the corners of her mouth. 

“I’m almost done,” she said, sorting the second-last batch into their respective compartments in the operating theatre’s cupboards. Many of the tools were chipped and warped by time, having migrated to Factory Station by virtue of being discarded by the wealthier stations in Arkadia, but Clarke stubbornly took care of each one like she took care of the people she needed them for.

“What’s the point of having hours posted on the door if you don’t actually follow them at all?” Bellamy continued. Clarke could tell he was teasing her, now, but two years ago when she’d first been assigned to Factory Station, the barbs they’d traded hadn’t been playful at all. She’d been assigned to replace the previous retiring doctor only days after completing her training, and Bellamy - like most of the other residents - had seen her appointment as the insult it was meant to be, that the lives in Factory weren’t valued enough by Alpha to be treated by a real doctor. 

“You can make yourself helpful, Cadet Blake, and wipe down the counters,” Clarke replied, still not looking at him. 

He was silent for a moment, and then she felt his arm deliberately brush her shoulder as he reached past her for the disinfectant. She felt his breath on her ear as he leaned in and froze. 

“As you wish,” he murmured, and then he stole a kiss so quickly Clarke nearly missed it. 

“Someone could see,” Clarke hissed, whirling around as he danced out of reach, retreating to the front counter with the faint traces of a smirk on his lips. 

“Who, princess? The Guard? Don’t be unrealistic. They don’t actually care about the surveillance in Factory.”

“It’s the principle of the matter. I’m a _professional_.”

Bellamy was quiet as they finished closing up the clinic. “I know,” he said, so quietly she could have imagined it. The lights in the hall outside the clinic were dimmed onto the night cycle, and the stars beyond the windows seemed brighter than usual. Bellamy tapped his fingers against the hilt of his sword as Clarke fumbled with the key ring.

“Walk me home, Cadet Blake?” she asked. 

“As you wish,” he said. Two years ago, it had been a mocking phrase, meant for the princess he’d thought her to be. Somewhere along the line, it had come to mean something else. Something that filled Clarke with warmth.

They did not speak or hold hands or even acknowledge each other much as they meandered the halls towards Clarke’s apartment, but Clarke knew he was slowing his pace, like she was, to make the walk last longer. They nodded at the odd straggler that was still out and about and pretended it was perfectly normal for an on-duty cadet to escort someone along to a destination that _wasn’t_ Arkadia’s jail. At her front door, Bellamy’s knuckles brushed the back of hers. 

“We need to talk,” he murmured, and Clarke discreetly looked both ways down the residence corridor before pushing him inside. 

“What is it?” Bellamy paced around her small living room, his eyes roving over the wilted flowers - real, organic flowers - in the chipped mug on the coffee table, the closed door that led to a separate bedroom she was lucky to have. Her apartment was far nicer than the usual on Factory Station, and Clarke’s skin prickled in discomfort the longer he went without talking. “Bellamy?”

“I don’t want to sneak around anymore,” he said softly, stopping his pacing on the other side of the coffee table. It put him only a meter away from her, but the distance felt greater. “And we both know the differences in our stations won’t let us have a legitimate relationship.”

A chill fell over Clarke. “Then we are at an impasse,” she choked out, somehow managing to keep her voice level and her face blank of the despair she was holding at bay. “You aren’t - this isn’t - “ _a breakup?_

“I know,” Bellamy said. “Which is why I’m turning in my badge at midnight and Octavia and I are getting on a mining ship.”

“No!” Clarke replied, scandalized. 

“I’ll never win over your mother if I stay here,” Bellamy said, raising his palms like this was a fight he could defuse. “Out there, there’s a chance. Maybe we’ll strike gold.”

“You _know_ how many of my patients come in for mining injuries,” Clarke hissed at him, stepping around the coffee table and jabbing a furious finger into his chest. Asteroid mining was dangerous enough when done properly, but the Factory crews were notoriously understaffed and ill-equipped, bribing their way past the health and safety committees just to have a chance to make a living. “And fuck, let’s say you _do_ get lucky, then you’ll be boarded by _pirates_.”

“You don’t think I could take a pirate or two?” Bellamy tried to joke, but the humour didn’t reach his eyes. 

“Don’t do this. You could get killed,” Clarke begged him. When his eyes softened and his gloved hand came up to cradle her cheek, Clarke let out a breath of relief. Bellamy smiled sadly. 

“Since I don’t take orders from you, I’m going to need a better reason,” he said.

“Death isn’t a good enough reason?” Clarke demanded. 

“For you? It’s worth the risk,” Bellamy said, and then Clarke knew there was no talking him out of it. 

“Stay with me a while?” she asked, her voice trembling only slightly. “Until you have to go?” She took his hand and he wordlessly followed her to her bunk, where they lay in the dark for a while, his hand slowly stroking her hair.

  
  


Two months later the mining ship _Charybdis_ is attacked and boarded by the dread pirate Augustus, and something inside of Clarke dies.

It remains dead for six more years.

Arkadia is the first respectable stop for mining ships on the way to other kingdoms, so strangers in the hallways of the stations is hardly a rare occurrence. Strangers causing a commotion isn’t rare, either; Clarke has often enough treated the aftermath of a bar fight after some crew drunk on victory after hitting metaphorial - or literal - asteroid gold starts a fight with another. 

So the sudden crowd of people gathered at the junction where Factory station meets Arrow Station barely registers as unusual. She adjusts the weight of a hefty crate of supplies in her arms and sighs at the sight. Two young teenagers roughly elbow past her to the front of the crowd, disappearing into a sea of work uniforms and leaving a trail of adults rubbing their sides in their wake. Clarke follows with a frown, the crate in her arms leaving her a lot less room to maneuver through the packed corridor. 

“Excuse me, excuse - “ she says, over and over, her mind already drifting ahead to preflight checks and the route she’ll take today. She’s startled to find the crowd finally end, and more startled still to see the woman in the red dress tilt her head in her direction. The woman is a startling splash of colour against gray metal and gray overalls and gray faces - even her face is sharper and more vivid than the ones around her, her cheeks and lips painted with rouge. She draws attention like a black hole, and for a moment, Clarke is rooted firmly in place, her heart pounding in her chest. 

Then Thelonious steps forward, breaking the woman’s line of sight. 

“Clarke!” he announces with a smile, his voice carrying even over the restless muttering of the crowd. “You’ve come to hear about the City of Light, haven’t you!” He doesn’t say it like a question.

“No,” Clarke mutters, shifting the crate of supplies to her other hip. “No, I’m in the middle of something.”

Thelonious laughs as though she’s said something funny, and gestures dramatically at her, his attention back upon the rest of the crowd. 

“Do you see this?” he asks loudly. “Do you see yourselves, always hurrying, always stressed. There’s always something that needs your time more than your own happiness. This is what I mean, this is what Alie has come to save us from.”

It’s been a while since Clarke saw Thelonious in more than passing, since she’s all but broken away from her mother’s circles, but she doesn’t remember him being like this. Something is different, and it makes the back of her neck prickle with unease. She’s startled to see heads around her nodding, to see people murmuring thoughtfully. 

“Take the key,” Thelonious urges them, and from behind his back he pulls out a handful of small, glittering wafers. People break away from the crowd, one by one, to step forward and accept a wafer. He stares at Clarke over their heads. “Take the key, Clarke,” he says softly, gently. “I know you have suffered so much. Don’t you want to leave all that pain behind and see the City of Light?”

Clarke swallows hard. Someone in the crowd brushes against her shoulder, unbalancing her, and for a split second as she stumbles she swears she hears his laugh. But he’s been gone six years. He’s never coming back, and she’d rather carry the simultaneous pain and joy of his memory with her the rest of her life than having never had him, even if the time they got together was so short. 

She takes a step back into the corridor she came from, and another, and another. 

“You don’t erase pain,” Clarke tells Thelonious, as the first initiates place the wafer on their tongues. 

“Where are you going?” Thelonious asks, raising his voice as she backs away.

“Pirate hunting,” Clarke says dryly, and finally she turns tail and pushes through the crowd, vanishing into a sea of bodies.

The woman in red looks on curiously, noting the people who watch Clarke leave and move on themselves without taking the wafer. After Thelonious has distributed wafers to everyone who will accept one, he steps close to her and lowers his voice. 

“Clarke is well-respected in Arkadia - for her lineage in some stations, and for her work in others. If we convert her, it will convince many others.”

“You have a plan?” the woman in red queries, tilting her head again.

“I do,” he says. “I’ll have her brought back.”

Clarke still doesn’t quite think of her ship as _her_ ship, though it hasn’t been Jake Griffin’s since before she even met Bellamy. She did take the liberty of making a few modifications of her own to the _Phoenix_ … a keel-mounted harpoon gun, rerouted engine coolant courtesy of Raven Reyes of Mecha station to keep the ship going longer, and a new bunk to crash in. 

She doesn’t often get enough time to make these trips, and as she sets down her crate of supplies in the cockpit and pulls out the checklist, she’s acutely aware of the minutes slipping by, all racing towards her next shift in medical in two days.

Two days will have to be enough. Rumour has it the dread pirate Augustus has been spotted back in this stretch of space, and Clarke intends to collect interest on the pain he’s caused her, or die trying.

She forces herself to slow down through the pre-flight checks, making sure the _Phoenix’s_ tanks are full and all the maintenance scans come back positive even though she itches to be off Arkadia already. She wasted too much time with Thelonious and his strange new friend. Even inside the safety of the _Phoenix’s_ familiar, dusty cockpit, Clarke’s skin prickles. She took the long way around to Arrow station’s hangar, but she swears she can still feel the eyes of the woman in red on her back. She shudders and forces herself to go down the checklist methodically. 

And then there’s nothing keeping her here. She straps into the pilot’s seat and carefully, carefully, eases the ship out of its drydock and along the path traffic control instructs her on the radio. Leaving the hangar feels daunting every time, but once Clarke is out into free space she eases the joystick this way and that, feeling the _Phoenix_ respond around her, and she relaxes as the practice comes rushing back in. 

Her heart lifts as she leaves Arkadia behind in the wake of her rockets and cruises past vivid ion clouds and asteroids. The worries of her work on Factory station - the long list of delayed medical shipments, the endless roster of patients whose pain she can only ease, the politics of her assignment when all she wants to do is heal - it all melts away. And in its place is only a kind of fierce, bloodthirsty joy. 

The dread pirate Augustus is out here somewhere, closer than he’s ever been, and Clarke will find him. That first day cycle, she puts the _Phoenix’s_ engine into cruise and tilts back her chair, flipping through long-range radio frequencies and listening to an endless parade of miner and merchant and passenger ships giving reports on conditions along their trajectories. She marks their vectors on the holographic map the _Phoenix_ helpfully projects for her and eyes the empty spaces between the bright white trajectory lines. 

That’s where she’d hide, if she was a pirate waiting for a rich prize to wander by, so that’s where she’ll start.

She’s distracted from plotting a course by a new voice on the radio. An SOS signal. 

“I repeat,” the gravely voice says. “We are in sector G23M06, and we desperately need assistance. We’ve lost the engine, we have maybe an hour of life support on our generator. Is anyone out there?”

Clarke knows before she’s even checked her map again that she’s the closest ship. Revenge momentarily forgotten, she leans forward and opens her radio channel. 

“This is the _Phoenix_ , I’m in sector G23M06. What class ship are you and how many are your crew?”

There is a moment of silence on the radio, broken only by static. 

“We are a yacht, there are three of us.”

A yacht! A yacht, she can help. A cruiser or a frigate, she would have been far too small to make a difference. Clarke lets out a breath of relief, even as her heart drops knowing this SOS signal will take a huge chunk out of the time she has to find Augustus. Still, she has to answer. There aren’t any laws out in space, not in the void past the boundaries of the kingdom-stations. The only thing they have is human kindness - a mutual, unspoken agreement to drop everything and come to an SOS, knowing someone would come to yours. The three people on the beached ship could be someone’s Bellamy. 

It’s worth it. She forces down the bitterness and opens her end of the channel again. “On my way. You’re in luck. I can either tow you or fit your crew on board, though it’ll be a tight squeeze.”

The outpouring of thank yous that comes on the radio almost makes it worth it. 

It takes her twenty minutes to reach the beached ship. It doesn’t look that bad from the outside; no obvious damage, no trail of debris, but the rockets are cold and dead and the ship’s lights are all dark. Clarke still hurries to line up the airlocks on their ships - a craft that size isn’t going to have a lot of air. As soon as the _Phoenix_ gives her an affirmative beep, she powers down and races to the airlock hatch in the cargo hold. She can hear the creak of metal from the other side, telling her the other crew is unlocking their own hatch. She turns the heavy wheel and lifts the hatch up with a grunt. 

Her ears pop as the pressure of their joined ships equalizes with a rush of air, and Clarke looks down the hatch to see three people staring up at her. 

“Hey,” she says. “Glad you’re all right. Are you coming up, or am I towing you?”

“Is there a space station nearby?” the lone woman on the crew asks. She has an intricate crescent-shaped tattoo down the bridge of her nose and along one cheekbone, but Clarke can’t immediately place it with any clan. 

“Nothing nearby,” she admits. “Not for parsecs. Just Arkadia, a few hours away.”

The tallest man of the crew, broadly built and bearing long-healed scars, grins at her. There’s no humour in it. 

“Then there will be no one to hear you scream,” he says, and Clarke doesn’t have time to react before he reaches up and places a cloth over her mouth. She tastes the knockout agent, raises her fist to punch him, and is out cold before she knows if it connects with his face. 

When Clarke wakes, her head is throbbing, her hands are cold and numb from the ties binding her wrists together, and she is lying in an unceremonious heap on the floor of the cockpit of a ship that is _not_ hers, and does _not_ appear to be _nearly_ in as rough of a shape as they described over the radio. 

The third member of a crew, a slighter, scruffy man, glances over as she lets out an involuntary angry hiss. 

“She’s awake,” he says flatly, and the taller man with long, greasy hair glances over his shoulder at her from the pilot’s seat. 

“What the _fuck_ ,” Clarke says, scrambling awkwardly to sit up with her hands bound and her head pounding. She spits at the scruffy man, partially to annoy him, and partially to do something about the godawful aftertaste of whatever they used to knock her unconscious. 

“It’s not personal,” the scruffy man says, like that’s supposed to reassure her. They’re not pirates, Clarke doesn’t think. It’s not their style to lure in single-seater yachts with nothing valuable on them. They would have gone for a miner or a merchant ship. So why her?

“Then what the hell is it?” Clarke demands. 

“The woman in red offered a lot of money for you,” the man in the pilot’s seat says. 

“She doesn’t need to know the details, Roan,” the tattooed woman says, even as she gets out of her seat and pulls a hip flask off her belt. She kneels in front of Clarke and unscrews the cap with one hand, the other pinning the flask to her stomach in absence of a good grip. “Here,” she says, almost gentle as she raises the flask. “You must be thirsty. I’m Emori.”

Clarke presses her lips together and glares long enough for her to get the idea. With a sigh, Emori rescrews the flask and puts it back on her belt, next to a sword sheath.

“You took those wafers Thelonious was offering out?” Clarke asks. 

“God, no,” the scruffy man says. “Have you actually talked to people who have? It’s like they’ve been lobotomized.” Emori gets a stricken look on her face, and he hastily backtracks. “I’m sorry, Emori.”

Emori stares straight ahead at Clarke, ignoring him. Her jaw clenches. 

“Murphy was right that it’s really not about you,” Emori says. “I’m sure you’re a nice person, Clarke. But I need you to get close enough to the woman in red.” And with that, she stands up and retreats to her seat, a new tension in her shoulders.

Several minutes pass in silence, as Clarke tries to discreetly test the ties around her wrist and her kidnappers find other things to occupy themselves with. Then, Murphy breaks the silence. 

“There’s a ship following us,” he says. 

“What?” Emori asks.

Roan mutters a curse, pulling up the same radar projection Murphy is looking at. Clarke holds her breath. There’s a blip on the map - flickering and inconstant, but a blip nonetheless.

“Could be pirates,” Murphy says. “Radar is barely picking them up, so they must have some kind of shielding.”

“No one’s taking our bounty away,” Emori says fiercely. “I won’t let them.”

“They won’t,” Roan says. “I’ll arrange to have another craft waiting for us at the next port. We’ll switch ships and the trail will go cold. With all the traffic coming in and out, they’ll never be able to track us.”

Clarke sits back and lets out a long, heavy exhale. She’s not getting away right now, not with the knockout agent still lingering in her system, making her dizzy and giving her the worst headache of her life. They’ll have to wake her up to move her to the other ship, and there will be an opportunity there. She closes her eyes and tries to rest. 

She’s roughly shaken away some hours later. 

“Welcome to the cliffs of insanity,” Roan says flatly, and drags her to her feet. Clarke’s heart immediately falls. The cliffs is the unofficial name of a seedy little port just past Arkadia’s borders, well known for being built into the side of a massive asteroid and spanning two dozen levels. Roan couldn’t have picked a better place to lose a trail. Whoever was following them - and at this point Clarke is sure they can’t be any worse than her kidnappers - will never be able to find them in the cliffs. “Emori, you stay with the ship and get rid of our tail. Murphy and I will go prepare the other ship.”

“I don’t think I like this plan,” Murphy says, stepping closer to Roan and narrowing his eyes. 

“Have more confidence in your girlfriend’s swordmanship,” Roan says, as Emori draws her sword from its sheath with a clean metallic scrape.

Murphy scowls, but he takes Clarke’s other arm and helps Roan drag her off the ship. She doesn’t make it easy for them, digging her heels in and letting herself become dead weight, until Roan gives an impatient grunt and heaves her entire body over his shoulder. They get a few odd looks as they climb up stairwells and Clarke yells for help to every passerby - but this is the cliffs, it’s a pirate port. There’s no law here. There’s no one to help. 

Emori, meanwhile, leaves the door to the ship invitingly open and locks herself in the cockpit, settling in to wait. It doesn’t take long for her trap to spring.

She just doesn’t expect a single man to appear, alone. 

He only startles a little bit when the door locks behind him, and she watches him prowl about the ship from the security feeds, checking every compartment, one hand on his sword at all times. She likes him more for having a sword, like her. They learned a long time ago that bullets and the vacuum of space pressing at the thin walls of stations and ships don’t mix, but many people use tasers or batons instead. Emori idly flips the hilt of her sword over and over in her dominant hand until the man finally clears the rest of the ship and comes to stand in front of the locked cockpit door. He looks up straight into the security camera, as though he knows where it is. 

Emori deliberates, and then turns on the intercom. 

“I was expecting a bigger crowd,” she says. 

“I hate to disappoint,” the man says. The graininess of the cheap camera and the mask obscuring half his face leave little trace of his features visible to her, but a lone man in all black is never a good sign. 

Emori doesn’t usually care about honor. But she expected a whole pirate crew to swarm in on their tail, and suddenly rigging the ship to flood with poisonous gas while she plays both bait and executioner in the cockpit seems, well, unfair. She thumbs the button next to the door thoughtfully. 

“I can’t let you chase us,” she says, almost apologetic. “I _need_ this bounty. The woman in red killed my brother, and this is the only way I’ll get close enough for revenge.”

“I can understand that,” the man says. “If someone hurt my sister… I would feel the same.”

And something in his voice makes Emori unable to push the button. 

“Tell you what,” she says. “I’ll come out and we’ll fight it out properly. No tricks - “ well, maybe some tricks, but he doesn’t need to know - “Just swordsmanship.”

“Sounds good to me,” the man says, and beneath the mask, she sees him smile. She draws her sword and unlocks the door. 

The new ship Roan leads them to, through a series of dizzily twisting corridors and airlocks, is a rusty old shuttle nearly twice the size of the previous yacht. The cargo hold is open, like Roan’s contact promised, but when they drag Clarke up to the cockpit they find the door jammed with rust and unaligned hinges. No cockpit means no flight control, which means Clarke has more time to figure something out and get away. 

“Don’t look so happy,” Roan tells her after he dumps her on the ground. “Murphy, don’t take your eyes off her. I’m going to go hunt down a crowbar.”

Murphy leans against the far wall and crosses his arms insouciantly as Roan strolls off. Clarke stares at him, discreetly twisting her wrists behind her back in case the bonds have gotten any looser. (They haven’t.) Murphy stares back. 

“You seem like you really care about Emori,” Clarke says. “Doesn’t it worry you that Roan expects her to deal with an entire pirate crew?”

Murphy barks out a laugh. 

“You haven’t seen Emori in action,” he says, but then his frown becomes more pronounced. His foot begins to tap anxiously. 

“Well, even if she won, how would she get here in time? If I didn’t know better, I’d say Roan is willing to lift off without her.”

Murphy opens his mouth and closes it, silently. Clarke raises her eyebrows. 

“Just shut up,” he says at last, pointedly looking away from her. Footsteps coming up the ladder from the cargo hold jolt both of them out of the silent tension. Clarke is watching Murphy, so she sees fear and disbelief flash across his face before it goes blank, and only then does she register that the stranger that has just arrived isn’t Roan or Emori. 

In fact, it looks an awful lot like the grainy surveillance footage she’s been able to find of the dread pirate Augustus. Clarke bares her teeth and glares as the masked man as Murphy plants himself between her and the ladder and pulls out a pulse gun. 

“We can make a deal,” Augustus says in a low voice. Clarke’s breath catches in her lungs, and she feels anger spreading like a burning heat through her body, making her hands shake with adrenaline behind her back, making her jaw ache from how tightly she’s clenching it. Six years. Six years of hunting the man who took Bellamy from her, and what a joke that he comes to her when she’s unarmed and vulnerable. “I left your companion in a timed recycling airlock on level 14. She’s still alive. If you leave now, you can get there before the airlock opens.”

Murphy barely hesitates. He glances in the direction that Roan left once, and then lowers his gun and darts past the stranger without another moment of deliberation. 

Augustus makes no move to stop him. As soon as he’s out of sight, he strides forward and kneels in front of Clarke, his hands flying up to cup her face. 

“Don’t touch me,” she snarls, jerking her head back and pressing herself as close to the wall as she can. God, if only her hands were tied in front of her, she could strangle him, but she’s not sure how to do anything like this. 

“Clarke,” he says softly. 

“My name doesn’t belong in your filthy, murderous mouth. You ruined my life, like you’ve ruined hundreds of lives, and if I could kill you right now - “ His hands are shaking in front of her. Clarke’s brain suddenly catches up to her in her fog of anger. “Wait, how do you know my name?”

His eyes. She finally registers the eyes of a dead man. Clarke’s anger rushes away like the air in a sudden vacuum and its absence leaves her empty and weak and disbelieving - but those are his eyes. She knows them. She knows him. 

“…Bellamy?” she whispers, her eyes filling with tears and her lip starting to tremble. He reaches up to take the mask off, and she gets just a second to take in his face - the cut of his cheekbones, the relieved smile, more stubble on his jaw and crinkles at the corners of his eyes than she remembers, strange and achingly familiar all at once. Just a second, because in the next, she sees Roan’s shadow looming over Bellamy. 

Her cry of alarm gives Bellamy enough time to dodge that the crowbar comes down on his shoulder rather than his head. The crack it makes when it connects seems to echo through the ship and Clarke can’t do anything from the ground but ineffectively kick at Roan’s ankles as Bellamy groans in pain and tries to stand. 

It’s a losing fight from the start. 

Bellamy manages to scramble to his feet, but lets out another cry of pain when he reaches for the sword on his hip. Roan advances unflinchingly, driving Bellamy into a corner with wild swings of the crowbar, and a single glance of despair towards Clarke at the exact wrong moment makes him miss sweeping his feet out from under him with a low kick. Bellamy hits the ground with a crashing thud and Roan brings the crowbar down on his thigh. 

“Stop!” Clarke cries out. “Stop, don’t hurt him, I’ll go willingly! I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t hurt him!”

Bellamy wheezes out a weak protest as Roan freezes above him, the crowbar raised, and slowly turns his head to look at her. His face is unreadable for an agonizing moment and Clarke’s pulse roars in her ears. 

Then Roan merely nods and stands up. He pays them no attention as he eases the crowbar into the gap between the rusty doors and pries them apart. Clarke forces herself up and stumbles over to Bellamy as the ship comes to life around them and she feels them take off from the cliffs. 

“Bellamy?” Clarke whispers as she kneels next to him. “Bellamy, are you all right?”

“I think he dislocated my shoulder,” he says hoarsely. “Not my finest moment.”

“I can put it back into place if you’re able to untie me,” Clarke says, and after another moment Bellamy manages to sit up and motion for her to turn around. The first touch of his fingers on her wrists makes her whole body shiver. She’s so painfully aware of him being just behind her, of the wonder and the impossibility of his existence here, that she has to remind herself to keep breathing as he slowly picks apart the knots. “If I turn around, will you be gone?” she murmurs. “Is this a bad dream? Will you be dead again when I wake up?”

“I’m real,” he says softly, and finally the last knot falls away and her hands are free. 

Still, Clarke hesitates before turning back to face him. Seeing his face is no less breathtaking the second time than it was the first. 

“Hi,” she breathes out, and he wordlessly cups her cheek and kisses her. And, oh, she didn’t know until now how many details those six years erased from her memory. The chapped edge of his lips, how terribly _warm_ he is against her skin - 

“I know I’ve been gone… a very long time,” Bellamy mumbles against her mouth, hardly able to get the words out when she keeps raining kisses on his mouth and jaw. “I swear I couldn’t get away any faster. If you were mad - “

“How could I be mad at you?”

“You have been many times,” he says with a crooked smile.

_But I didn’t love you so much then_ , she thinks impulsively, and is startled to discover that she doesn’t love any less than she did the day he left on that mining ship. She thinks she knew that, unconsciously, but she’d spent so much of the past six years dwelling on the anger more than the pain.

He tells her his side of the story as she sets his shoulder back into place and checks the rest of his injuries. The dread pirate Augustus did indeed capture and board their ship on its way home with a sizeable load of hythlodium - but he didn’t kill them, for some reason. He and Octavia were taken on as cabin boys for reasons as unknown and mysterious as the dread pirate’s mercurial moods. He threatened to have them floated every other day or so, but they worked their way up his chain of command, earning their right to live one day at a time.

“As it turns out, there’s been a lot of dread pirate Augustus-es over the years,” Bellamy finishes with a wry smile. “When ours wanted to retire, well, he offered us the ship and his name. Octavia took it, and I stayed on as her first mate just long enough to make sure she’d be all right.”

“ _Octavia_ is the new dread pirate?” Clarke asks, trying to reconcile that with the memory she has of the reckless young teenager she used to know. 

“It suits her.”

“I’m not as surprised as I should be,” Clarke admits, and when Bellamy laughs, she takes his hand, still exhilarated to have him back, to be relearning everything about him.

It’s not until the ship’s engine drops into a lower whine and they hear the faintest traces of Roan negotiating landing with Arkadia’s traffic control from the cockpit that Clarke’s awe turns to dread. 

“He’s taking us back to the woman in red,” she tells Bellamy quietly. “I had a bad feeling when I met her, but Bellamy, the fact that Thelonious apparently sent bounty hunters after me… it scares me. Something is very wrong here.”

“I know. She’s already taken the kingdom of Polis,” he says seriously. 

“Then we have to stop her.”

“Whatever happens, stay close to me,” he says softly. 

When the ship’s engine finally goes silent and Roan walks out of the cockpit, they are on their feet, pressed close enough together that Roan can’t see they’re holding hands behind Bellamy’s back. 

He scrutinizes them for a moment, and then pointedly taps the pulse gun on his hip. 

“You promised,” he says, and something in his tone suggests he finds their obvious hostility _funny_. 

Clarke and Bellamy exchange a glance, and reluctantly follow him off the ship and into the hangar. There’s no where else to go, anyway, not if they want to face the woman in red. 

She’s waiting for them at the bottom of the ramp, her dress and her face both as pristine and vivid as they were before. She clasps her hands in front of her and tilts her head, as though Clarke is a particularly interesting puzzle to solve. Thelonious is standing with her, and he steps forward with a smile. 

“Welcome home, Clarke,” he says warmly. 

“Really?” she asks. “Having me kidnapped is your idea of a _welcome_?” It doesn’t escape her attention, of course, that Roan has parked them in one of the smaller, lesser-used hangars, and there are no civilians to be seen anywhere, just two rows of blank-faced guards in full gear. She can feel Bellamy shifting uneasily next to her, whether looking for familiar faces in the guard, or assessing their weaknesses, she’s not sure. 

“Sometimes we do things we don’t like for the greater good,” Thelonious says sagely. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two things, handing the first - a credit chip, no doubt payment for her bounty - to Roan. The second, he holds out to her and uncurls his fingers to reveal one of those small wafers. “Take it, Clarke. For the greater good.”

“Don’t,” Bellamy murmurs into her ear. 

Thelonious eyes Bellamy. “Isn’t this that boy from Factory you were enamored with a few years ago?”

Clarke swallows hard. 

“None of your business,” she snaps. 

“Take the chip, or he does,” Thelonious says. The woman in red raises a hand, and the two rows of guards unholster their pulse guns and batons in a movement so eerily coordinated that even Roan takes a step back in alarm.

Clarke’s hand shakes in Bellamy’s. 

“If I take it, what happens to Bellamy?”

“Clarke, _no_ ,” he says, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her to face him. Clarke wrenches out of his grip and plants her feet. 

“ _What happens?”_ she insists over Bellamy’s protests. 

“He’s free to go,” Thelonious says, his outstretched hand never wavering. And Clarke wants to believe him so, so badly. 

“Then I’ll take it,” Clarke whispers. 

“I just got you back!” Bellamy shouts, as the guards march forward. Clarke steps close and gives him one last fleeting kiss, holding fistfuls of his jacket as long as she can. 

“I thought you were dead once and it almost destroyed me,” she tells him urgently. “I can’t… I can’t do that again. Not when I could save you this time.”

“Clarke, no!” he cries, and then the guards are pulling them apart, not a single one of them flinching from the blows Bellamy manages to strike out before he’s overwhelmed. Two of them drag Clarke away and force her down to her knees on the cold metal floor. Her arms are twisted behind her back for the second time today, and it goes against every survival instinct, every muscle in her body tensed to spring and fight. Thelonious approaches sedately with the wafer in hand. 

“You made the right choice,” he says warmly. 

Clarke opens her mouth and lets him give her the wafer. _For Bellamy_ , she thinks desperately, and then she doesn’t think of much at all. 

A moment later the guards step back and she stands up in one smooth motion, her arms hanging loosely at her sides, her face pleasant and relaxed. 

She doesn’t even react when Alie tells the guards to take Bellamy to the nearest recycling airlock, and his cries of her name echo down the corridor as he’s dragged away.

“Hey. Hey, idiot, wake up!”

Bellamy blinks awake groggily, and immediately begins throwing up. 

Rough hands help him roll onto his side and thump his back as he sputters and coughs. He lets out a low groan when he sees blood on the floor. 

“He got a bad dose, didn’t he?”

“What?” Bellamy asks hoarsely. He collapses back on his back and blinks up at the ceiling of an airlock before his eyes are able to focus on the faces of the two people bent over him. It’s the woman with the crescent tattoo who almost beat him in a swordfight, and her scruffy partner. He has just enough presence of mind to remember that this should be surprising, for some reason. 

“The chipped guards,” the scruffy one explains, holding a painfully shrill geiger counter over Bellamy’s face. “They gave you a detour through the reactor room. Honestly, you should be dead already. Emori and I are going to need radiation pills just being _near_ you.”

“Uh,” Bellamy says intelligently. 

“Come on, can you stand?” Emori urges. “We paused the airlock cycle, but someone could come by at any moment. We have to get out of here, get up! Murphy, grab his other arm.”

Bellamy swims in and out of consciousness as they drag him out and down a long corridor with flickering lights. Murphy lets his head bang against one or two corridors, and Bellamy’s pretty sure its on purpose. He begins to vaguely remember lying to him and saying he’d locked Emori in an airlock, when actually, he’d just left her in her bunk on their ship to sleep off a blow to the head. 

“Why are you…” he asks groggily. 

“Saving your life?” Murphy supplies helpfully. Bellamy nods, and is immediately overwhelmed by another wave of nausea so bad they have to let him sit for a moment.

“I don’t like owing people,” Emori says. “You could have killed me. Now we’re even.”

“Wait,” Bellamy gasps, grabbing her hand. “The woman… the woman in red. She has Clarke.”

She and Murphy exchange a glance that makes him miss Clarke like an amputated limb. He got barely an hour with her and already she felt so familiar, so natural.

“We’re going after her, aren’t we?” Murphy asks with a sigh. 

“Not with him in tow, we aren’t,” Emori says grimly, nudging Bellamy’s limp body with her foot. “It’ll take a miracle to get him on his feet.”

“Well, if you want a miracle…” Murphy says, and hauls Bellamy upright. He promptly passes out again.

The next time he wakes, he’s lying on his back on a kitchen table, and Raven Reyes is flicking a needle full of pitch-black liquid with a look of utmost concentration. 

“What?” he asks groggily, and she gives him a grim smile. 

“Long time no see, Blake,” she says, and then he feels the sharp bite of the needle in the crook of his elbow.

“The hell is that?” he groans. 

“A little something to help you metabolize the absurdly high dose of radiation you got,” Raven says. He hears a clink as she discards the needle and winces as she swabs the injection site. 

Another half-remembered face appears over him. Jasper Jordan, from Agro. He gave Bellamy extra rations in exchange for looking the other way for some of his chemistry projects. 

“I helped,” Jasper says. “You’re only mostly dead now. Is it true you became a pirate?”

“It wasn’t exactly a choice,” Bellamy says. 

“Stop bothering him, go tell the others he’s awake,” Raven says, swatting at Jasper until he slips through the pneumatic door behind her and leaves them alone. 

“The others?” Bellamy asks. He struggles to sit up, and Raven helps him the rest of the way with a sigh. “Where am I?”

“The Arkadian resistance,” Raven says, a little mockingly. The door slides open again, and Jasper returns with what feels like a whole parade of people to Bellamy’s spinning, aching head. He remembers Harper and Miller from guard training - they were cadets a few years younger than him - and Monty from the library. Murphy and Emori are here too. She’s wearing new clothes, and he’s washed his hair. 

Bellamy blinks. 

“How long have I been…” he gestures. 

“Unconscious and half-dead?” Murphy asks. “Three days.”

Bellamy launches himself off the table with a curse, and immediately crumples into a pile on the floor when his legs don’t hold up his weight. Harper and Miller pull him to his feet and help him sit back on the table. 

“Calm down,” Raven says. “Monty and I have been giving you nightblood injections around the clock, but you still have a long way to go to recover.”

“I can’t just sit here,” Bellamy exclaims, staring at her wildly. “Jaha and a woman in red are going around recruiting people into some kind of cult - they threw me into an airlock - “

“We know, we know - “ Monty says with a wince.

“They have Clarke!” Bellamy yells. His voice cracks with emotion, and in the resulting silence no one seems to be able to look him in the eye. “We can’t lose Clarke,” Bellamy says. 

Jasper leans closer to Harper. 

“Well, that answers that bet we made,” he whispers, just barely loud enough that Bellamy can hear.

“That was _six years ago_ , how do you remember?” Harper hisses back.

“There’s some kind of chip,” Bellamy says, trying to instill a sense of urgency in Raven, who everyone else seems to be looking to as their leader. 

“I know, Bellamy,” she says, her voice hard. “I took it.” She glances to the side, her eyes lowered. “I wouldn’t be here without Jasper’s intervention.”

“Then you know…” he says. 

“We have a plan to take down Alie, yes,” Raven says. “But we’ve been waiting for an opportunity. A distraction. So that’s where you’ll come in, now that you’re properly awake.”

“What is it?” Bellamy asks. 

“We built an EMP and we’re going to use it to fry the chips and free everyone from the mind control at once,” Monty says. 

Bellamy blinks. 

“Monty,” he says flatly. “We live in space. You’re going to shut down _everything_ , including the station keeping us _alive_.”

“Yep,” Raven says, crossing her arms and popping the p. “That’s why we’ve been sneaking around, planting failsafes and backup generators to get life support systems up and running after we shut everything down. It’s risky, but it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

Everyone gathers close to hear Raven give the final rundown of the operation and their roles in it. By the time they’re ready to go, Bellamy can stand on his own two feet again - albeit, a little shaky.

“You move like you just had three hip operations,” Murphy sums it up as Miller distributes fresh power packs to everyone using a pulse gun.

“Humans only have two,” Emori murmurs. “Now, I hear rumours about the Kingdom of Bardo - “

“The first operation didn’t take, obviously,” Murphy replies. 

“If you’re quite done,” Bellamy says, trying not to look like he needs the cabinet he’s leaning on for support.

“Good luck, man,” Miller says, thumping Bellamy on the back as he passes and nearly sending him to his knees.

“We’re gonna need it,” Jasper whispers. 

“We’ll be fine, we got true love on our side,” Harper says with a wry grin, jerking her chin at Bellamy as she straps her gun to her back. “You think that happens every day?”

Bellamy lets them joke. He can hear the tremor of fear running underneath everyone’s voices, knows they need the banter to keep their nerves together as they get ready to separate. 

And then there’s no more time to kill - Monty starts ‘his’ shift in the control room, having managed to avoid capture by stealing the ID of someone who’s already been chipped, and gives the signal. 

Murphy and Emori are coming with Bellamy to the woman in red - because Emori needs to face her as badly as Bellamy needs to find Clarke, and Murphy won’t let them go alone. Miller’s taking a team to keep the forces guarding Alpha station’s main entrances occupied - using the guise of the dread pirate Augustus, no less! And Raven and her team will be making their way to Arkadia’s central reactors, to start working on bringing them back up as soon as her own EMP machine brings the kingdom to its knees.

The EMP machine is startlingly small, for something that will cause such destruction, but Bellamy’s arms still shake under its weight as he stumbles down empty corridors after Murphy and Emori, who check each intersection before allowing him to follow.

“I can carry it,” Murphy says, eyeing Bellamy’s shaking arms. 

“No,” Bellamy says. “I got it.” He’s carrying the key to Clarke’s freedom - to everyone’s freedom - in his arms. He can’t let anything happen to it.

“Through here,” Emori says, checking a small holographic map and gesturing them down a dusty side corridor. She finds the hatch she’s looking for and kneels down to start hacking the lock. 

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Murphy asks as the pin pad flashes red on her first try. 

“Yeah, definitely,” Emori snaps. Then, under her breath - “In theory.”

Bellamy hears the jangle of keys and an echoing laugh further down the corridor. He presses his back against the wall and peeks around the corridor just long enough to see a patrol approaching. 

“There’s someone coming,” he hisses to Emori. “Two guards. One laughed. Does that mean they’re not chipped?”

“I’m not sure,” Murphy says, peeking around the corner with him. “Emori, you really have to hurry it up.”

“I am trying my goddamn best,” she snaps. “Can’t you two distract them?”

“How?” Bellamy hisses. “We have no legitimate business hiding in a maintenance corridor while you pick the lock.”

“Give them enough of a show that they don’t notice me! Fucking kiss each other or something!”

Bellamy looks at Murphy. Murphy looks at Bellamy. 

“Fine,” Murphy snaps. 

“Don’t act like it’s such an ordeal, you said he was pretty,” Emori says. 

_You think I’m pretty?_ Bellamy thinks, but he doesn’t have time to say it before Murphy holsters his pulse gun and presses him up against the wall where their bodies will conveniently block anyone’s view of Emori - as long as they don’t look back. 

It’s been a while since Bellamy kissed someone with stubble, and the scrape of it against his skin is enticing enough that he hums against Murphy’s mouth. Murphy wraps his arms around Bellamy’s waist, partially to sell the kiss, and partially because Bellamy’s legs are giving out again. 

“I’m that good?” Murphy murmurs into the crook of his neck. 

“Lethal radiation dose,” Bellamy reminds him, and then, hearing the footsteps so close, grabs a fistful of Murphy’s hair and drags his mouth upwards again. 

He hears a sharp intake of breath from the first guard, and keeps his eyes firmly closed. _Sell it_ , he tells himself. _Sell it_. Don’t look to see if they’ve noticed Emori, don’t act like you’re in danger, don’t act like you have any reason to be afraid - 

“Uh, guys - “

Murphy is shaking imperceptibly against him, and Bellamy knows he’s not the only one scared. 

“Fellas, this is… I am sorry to bother but…”

“Can they hear us?”

“You know what, we’ll just. We’ll come back later.”

“ _Teenagers_.”

Murphy breaks away as the footsteps move on and stares at Bellamy. This close, all Bellamy can see are his eyes, wide and looming and frightened as all hell. 

Bellamy doesn’t start breathing again until the guards finally fade out of earshot. 

The hatch Emori was picking a moment ago squeaks open. Emori pokes her head out of the maintenance shaft.

“Are you coming?”

“You already picked it?” Murphy demands. 

“You seemed really focused,” she replies, totally unapologetic. “Grab the EMP and lets go. We’re on a tight schedule and if we hurry we don’t have to tell Raven we’re late because you two stopped to make out.”

Murphy swears up a storm as they follow Emori into the shaft. Bellamy stops to catch his breath just inside, and flashes Murphy a grin. 

“You think I’m pretty?” he asks. Murphy pushes his face away and stomps forward to take point. 

The maintenance shaft is cramped and alternatively freezing and blistering as they pass by coolant pipes and busy machinery. Each step kicks up a whirlwind of dust and seems to make Bellamy’s limbs heavier and heavier, until he can barely lift his feet up anymore and he’s just leaving drag marks in the dust, shambling after Emori on her war path. His eyelids drop. 

“Hey, let me carry that, you look like you’re about to collapse,” Murphy urges, slowing to fall into step with him. 

And suddenly he thinks of Clarke’s eyes filling with tears when she saw him. Six years. He made her wait six years. His eyes snap open and his hands cling tighter to the EMP machine.

“I’m not making her wait any longer,” he mumbles. 

“Shh,” Emori says, kneeling in front of a grate and holding up a finger for them to be quiet. 

Bellamy strains his ears. He hears Jaha first and feels a familiar wave of anger beginning in a childhood on Factory station and ending with the former Chancellor using him and Clarke like _pawns_. And then - the strangely flat, discordant voice of the woman in red. 

“I’m going to kill her,” Emori announces, and she draws her sword. 

“Wait, the plan - “ Murphy hisses. 

“She got away once,” Emori says. “She won’t get away again. For Otan!” and before anyone can stop her she raises her foot and kicks through the grate. Cries of alarm and a shaft of harsh white light pierces the maintenance shaft. Emori leaps through, yelling.

Murphy glances between the shattered grate and Bellamy exactly once. 

“Stay _right_ here,” he tells Bellamy, and jumps after Emori. 

Bellamy stares at the hole they just disappeared through. 

“Like _hell_ I’m staying right here,” he says, and readjusts the EMP machine in his arms and keeps stumbling on. _For Clarke._

Jaha startles when Emori bursts into the room, but the woman in red merely tilts her head. 

Emori stands with her shoulders back and her chin raised high and proud. She raises her sword to her eye-level and sights along its glinting length. 

“My name is Emori, and you killed my brother. Prepare to die.”

She’s only dimly aware of Murphy climbing down after her and trading barbs with Jaha. Her prize is the woman in red. 

“This is not a productive course of action,” the woman says in her perfectly flat, remorseless voice. 

“I don’t care,” Emori snarls, and she leaps.

Where do you lock up a princess?

In her tower, of course. 

Bellamy remembers the old Griffin apartment from his rounds as a guard. Six years later, the corridors are unchanged, aside from the total absence of life. They’re wider here on Alpha than the corridors of Factory station, the lights brighter, the vertical gardens every few meters more vividly green, and he feels terribly exposed as he limps along as quickly as his aching body will take him. His breath echoes so loudly and ragged behind him he’s afraid it’ll be enough to give him away, but he manages to duck and hide from the few patrols he finds. 

He stops in front of a door that never belonged to Clarke in the time he knew her. The mailbox next to the door is marked Councilwoman Griffin. He tries the door. 

It opens without a hint of resistance. 

The woman doesn’t make a single move to defend herself, not even unclasping her hands. Her expression is perfectly neutral and serene as Emori brings the sword down on her head. 

And… and it goes right through her, leaving only a ripple of small blue pixels in midair. 

Clarke is sitting at the desk in a pale blue sundress, her body turned away from the doorway and facing a blank wall. Even the sight of her blonde hair is enough to make Bellamy’s knees give out. He grabs onto it to keep himself upright. 

“Clarke,” he says. “Clarke, I’m here.”

Finally she turns to look at him, and there’s no recognition in her eyes. 

“Who are you?”

“There is no death in the City of Light,” the woman in red says. 

“Your stupid city killed my brother,” Emori replies, anguished. “He _trusted_ you, and you _erased_ everything that made him Otan!”

“Otan is safe in the City of Light. Take the key, and I could reunite you. I can give you _everything_ you want.”

“It’s Bellamy,” he says, stumbling forward and kneeling in front of her, the EMP machine tumbling out of his arms onto the floor. Her hand is cold and limp when he clasps it between his. “Clarke, I - I came back. I promised I would come back, and I did. I love you.”

“If I loved you, I would remember you,” she says. 

“The woman in red, she took your memories,” Bellamy says. “Please, Clarke, you have to try.”

In response, she clicks the safety off a pulse gun.

“Don’t do it, Emori,” Murphy warns as she lowers the sword, defeated.

“I know,” she snaps. “I want my brother back, you AI bastard. And if you can’t die, at least I can make sure you don’t kill anyone else.”

And she turns her back on the woman in red and drives her sword down on the wafer-making machine on the desk.

“I’m sorry,” Bellamy says. “For everything.”

And he triggers the EMP machine.

Ba-dump.

Ba-dump.

Ba-dump. 

“Bellamy?”

The pulse gun falls to the floor. Her hand hovers, trembling, over his cheek. 

Jaha falls to his knees, clutching his head, his mouth open in a silent scream. 

The woman in red is gone, and Emori sways violently, suddenly exhausted. Murphy catches her and strokes her hair as she cries. 

“You came back,” Clarke whispers, sliding off her seat and into his lap, her arms winding around his neck. 

“Of course. I promised,” Bellamy says.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, burying her face in the crook of his neck. Bellamy wraps his arms around her and rocks back and forth, his eyelids dropping. 

“If I’m forgiven, you’re forgiven,” he murmurs. “I’m home now.”

“And they all lived happily ever after, right?” Madi asks, her pale face shining like the moon above her blankets. Clarke carefully closes The Princess Bride, mindful of the book’s fragile binding, and smiles at her. Madi begged for a bedtime story, but Clarke wonders if she should have stuck closer to the original. Madi’s favourite stories are always the ones with Clarke’s friends in them, and she’s wide awake now, her eyes big and round and full of questions. “Right?” Madi urges. 

“Of course,” Clarke says. “Death cannot stop true love. It can only delay it a while,” she quotes. 

Madi settles back against her pillow, looking unconvinced. Clarke follows her gaze up to the stars, and she can’t stop herself from searching for the passage of the Ark across the sky, a tiny moving speck that never falls to the ground no matter how strongly she wishes.

“You think they have bedtime stories up there?” she asks over the sound of distant crickets and the crackle of their campfire.

Clarke smiles to herself.

“Bellamy’s full of stories,” she says, half to herself. “You’ll see when you meet him. His are better than mine, too.” 

“That’s not possible,” Madi mumbles. Clarke scoots closer and drops a kiss on Madi’s forehead instead of responding, and when Madi makes a warm, fond hum in the back of her throat, Clarke lets their foreheads rest together, taking comfort in the touch of another human being, in her little bright face, in the smell of tea that still lingers on her breath. Her forehead is still a little warm, but Clarke thinks the worst of the fever has broken, and tomorrow Madi will be leaping around the valley like a baby gazelle once more. 

“Good night, Madi,” Clarke whispers, sitting back. Her eyelids are finally drooping. Clarke watches her nod off and blinks away a lone tear threatening to form in one eye. She wonders what Bellamy would say if he knew that in all her stories, she is brave enough to have told him she loves him, that the universes she makes for Madi are all universes where that's strong enough to defeat everything. Clarke leans back against a rock and tilts her face back towards the constellations scattered across the sky above her, and dreams, someday soon, of coming home.

**Author's Note:**

> *covers face in embarrassment* I finished writing this at 10:47pm for an 11pm deadline and it shows.
> 
> If you enjoyed this absolute pile of nonsense, please check out the rest of the submissions in this and other Chopped rounds! It'll be a good time. Voting happening at some point. Also the fantasy round.


End file.
